Abstracts for Host 1/2007

The fact that something isn’t a part of the mainstream is not a criterion of quality. Interview with the poet Marek Sindelka

A shining example – a young poet creates his first collection, brings the manuscript to a renowned publishing house, the book is published within one year, and the author is awarded a prestigious literary prize. I know only one poet who has succeeded in doing exactly that: Marek Sindelka. While introducing the cover interview, we usually enumerate the writer’s achievements, speak about what he/she has gone through. But this time, we had to proceed differently. Marek Sindelka is only awaiting the core of his life. He is 22 years old, has published his first collection, entitled Strychnine, and has been awarded the Jiri Orten Prize.

Jiri Travnicek
Twenty-one years later: Second reading (Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was first published in Czech in 1985 – in the Toronto-based exile publishing house ’68 Publishers. Logically, this edition was inaccessible to most Czech readers. For this reason, the most famous book by the most famous Czech writer has long remained practically unknown in the author’s native country. Only now is the book commonly available in bookshops. How did we perceive this book twenty-one years ago, when scarce, illegally imported copies were clandestinely passing from hand to hand, and how do we perceive it now? How did it speak to us then and how does it speak to us now? Thanks to our distance today, the political and social connotations disappear and we can contemplate the novel’s real core.